The thing I’m wondering most, after looking over the final 2012-2013 18-49 Nielsen Ratings (with DVR viewership factored in) is this: Who the hell did Community have to blow to get renewed? NBC’s show, in fact, was the lowest rated scripted program on a “real” network television to get a renewal last year, and it was low. As in, 88th. As in, 11 spots lower than Happy Endings, as in TELEVISION GODS, YOU SAVED THE WRONG SHOW.

There were a few other surprises to me, like the fact that The Following was in the top 10. That Family Guy was 16th, but Bob’s Burgers was down around number 60. That New Girl was 27th, but that The Mindy Project is 71st. That Hannibal is higher rated than Celebrity Apprentice but that it hasn’t been renewed yet, while Donald Trump’s show has been. That Parenthood was all the way up to number 36 with DVR factored in, but that The Good Wife was all the way down at 65 once the old people were factored out. And that Grey’s Anatomy is still a top 10 show.

Here’s the full top 100. (For the record, CW’s highest rated show was Vampire Diaries at #111, followed by Arrow at #118). If you’re curious, Vulture also has a fascinating chart on how returning shows compared to their ratings last year (spoiler alert: Worse, for the most part).

I genuinely love a lot of the CW programming. TVD, Arrow, Supernatural, Nikita and even Hart of Dixie (SUMMER ROBERTS, WHUD UP) are weekly must-watch shows. Hell, they’re some of the only shows I watch.

That being said, I have no Earthly idea how they keep getting renewed. How is this network making any money?

Just as an aside: I do a lot of business in the Boomer & Older market, and guess what: there’s still a lot of buying power in people who fall out of the 18-49 demo. In fact, people over 60 have pensions (remember those? no, you and I never will) and lower housing costs as a rule, so they have the ability to buy stuff and do stuff.

Want to really feel bad? Without looking, I bet the overall ratings for Community rank better than this…which means a disproportionate share of the Community audience is over 50. But you’re still cool.

Yeah, that used to be the thinking, but it’s changed a lot over the last few years. The five-year economic depression and the student debt crisis have changed a lot of the early-to-middle-aged consumer patterns.

It’s like the outdated thinking that 60+ people don’t use the internet, or DVR’s, or cell phones.

That’s exactly what it is. I’m surprised Happy Endings didn’t get another season. 23 more episodes and that’s 80 episodes which is fourteen weeks of syndication, so that’s pretty close…shame it got cancelled.

@Lunchbox: I’m surprised, actually. We were working on the technology to put local ads into pay-per-view programming ten years ago, so I sort of assumed Netflix would be embedding national ads into the usual breaks — just like what Google can do if they want to. Thanks for the info.

It still baffles me that anyone bothers with American Football. It’s such a boring sport. It’s even more boring then regular football if that’s possible. Now I understand basketball but football? Really. For god’s sake those guys pause and regroup like every thirty seconds. I like my action non stop not with pauses all the time

Ami Football is both a strategy game like chess and a brute-force game involving teamwork. If you can’t understand (not agree with) why people like to participate in those things then you’re either a sociopath or not human.

Blah blah. It’s dull and boring. If I want to watch something that pauses every 30 seconds I will go watch sloth videos. When the Ami Football gets it’s shit together and actually gets it’s players to stop pussyfooting around and actually play for 40 minutes staright without any breaks then I might give this a chance

You bitch about pussyfooting and pauses and claim to like basketball? Basketball. You mean the sport where if the score is within 10 points in the last 6 minutes of the game, the teams use all their remaining timeouts? THEN, after they run out of timeouts, they deliberately foul the other team to, you know, stop the clock to get the ball back?